


lose my heart on the burning sands

by 1001cranes



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-18
Updated: 2012-02-18
Packaged: 2017-10-31 10:15:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/342888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1001cranes/pseuds/1001cranes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim lives in Sebastian's body - in his heart, yes, but because that is the other place certain to kill a man when you pierce it. Vulnerable to attack. Jim lives in Sebastian’s guts, in the blood running through his veins, the air in his lungs. The base of his spinal cord. Jim is a terminal affliction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lose my heart on the burning sands

**Author's Note:**

> many thanks to insunshine and agent_bandit for beta-ing and hand-holding
> 
> title from The Stooges' _I Wanna Be Your Dog_

In a world where most people try to stay two steps ahead of the competition, Jim Moriarty is twenty steps, thirty, a hundred; as prescient as an oracle with none of the ambiguity and all of the blood. He sees everything, he sees too much, the big-big-big picture, the strings that control the system, the unspoken rules and the ways you can break them, the risks and rewards, the odds and how to play them. He gets bored with one project, with juggling just three balls - it has to be a dozen flaming swords, one eye on something else, mind already on his next move.

"D'you ever just live in the moment?" Sebastian asked once - always once, just once, because Jim will answer or he won't - and Jim replied, "which moment?", and that was that.

| |

Sebastian met Jim standing over the body of a Mrs. Steward from Lauder. A contract he’d taken through a man who knew a man who knew a man, distant enough to not be a worry – or any sort of challenge, unfortunately, but beggars weren’t choosers, and Sebastian was close to being a beggar indeed. He had come back from Iran in disgrace, an honourable discharge tacked onto his file only by the strength of his father's good name. The job was a distraction, but he’s finding it’s very much like scratching an itch - you’re not going to get any relief until there’s blood.

Technically Sebastian had met Jim a few weeks before, playing under the name David Crawford, a mild sort of man prone to a general nerviness that would not serve him well in his job as a go-between. Jim Moriarty, on the other hand, hadn’t shown himself until this moment, and just because Sebastian doesn’t have a name for him yet doesn’t mean he can’t recognize this is a different creature entirely.

"Wellllll," Jim drawls - or sings, maybe, it sounds so much more like singing when he's amused - "you _did_ come here to kill her, didn't you?"

Sebastian's training tells him to shoot Jim, the man he still only knows as David Crawford, the madman in the person-shaped mask who stands before him now. The target is disabled, nearly unconscious, and this man bleeds danger, an aura of it pooling around him, flickering like a heat spot in Sebastian's vision. He should shoot him first. Of course he should.

Instinct tells him that would be a very, very bad idea.

 _In or out_ , the man's eyes say, and _oh, I could **make** you come in_ , the curve of his mouth, _but isn't it more fun if we **pretend**?_ hands in fists shoved into his pockets, foot tapping on the blood-slick floor.

"You can clean my shoes," he says, "or do something clever with the body."

To this day, Sebastian has chosen the body every time.

| |

It's easy enough to figure out they come from diametric opposites, Sebastian and Jim - their upbringings, their opportunities, their experiences, even their skills. Sebastian has only ever had the best of the best, wanted for little, schooling at Eton and law at Oxford – he should be a barrister, a Lord like his father, but he’s never felt the weight of those expectations much less seen the point to them.

Jim Moriarty is a man of the world, a no one from nowhere, with what might be a real Glasgow accent or the Yorkshire one he seems fond of, or something else entirely, something he never speaks, something he’s cobbled together with everything else. Hard to tell, anyway, the way his voice travels, the way he sings and croons, aerates every word into a gasp. There's a hunger in Jim that Sebastian could never understand - not a hunger to prove himself, exactly, but as if he's _dis_ proving everyone else - and the truth is Sebastian never had to understand. The silver spoon in his mouth kept him fed, didn't it; the only thing Sebastian could ever be hungry for was something _new_.

Sebastian doesn't know what endeared him to Moriarty, precisely - Jim's never said and Seb's never asked, _could_ never ask, can only assume it was a perfect alignment of the blood on his hands and the murder in his heart, the posh public school syllables that slide into the language of his childhood when he feels angry - the taps and trills of his r's, his slightly less sonorous j's. His father's voice, softened by years away from his homeland, away from his mother-tongue, his _mother's_ tongue.

"Ohhh, someone's got daddy issues, I see," Jim whispers one night, apropos of nothing Sebastian can figure. "Not to worry. Nearly everyone does."

| |

A few weeks into their acquaintance, Jim kidnaps the girl Sebastian has been seeing. She's from Devon; a bright girl, quite clever, because if there’s one thing Sebastian can’t stand it’s ineptitude in one form or another. It could never be serious, of course, but he likes her well enough.

Someone slides him an address card under his morning coffee one day, a faint embossed _M_ in the corner. A new job, something unexpected - someone’s made a desperate play, perhaps – or Jim is simply in one of his more unpredictable moods.

The address is to a warehouse in East London, one of a dozen in two neat rows, though the outsides of the buildings are anything but. When Sebastian slips in the door of #2, silent and carrying, he doesn't expect to find Rochelle tied up and bleeding in the middle of a fleet of storage containers.

It's not the last thing he expects, certainly, but it's far from the first.

He makes a noise of one kind of another, or perhaps Jim just _knows_ , because he turns on his heel. A spring in his step and a smile on his face.

Sebastian never doubted that Jim knew about Rochelle. Sebastian lives in a flat Jim purchased for him - posh even by his standard, a security system to rival Buckingham Palace and a doorman like a very polite brick wall in white gloves. Jim knows when Sebastian isn't there, and Sherlock Holmes is not the only one with a network of invisible informants. As ridiculous as it sounds, Sebastian had perhaps underestimated Jim's control issues. Maybe, he thinks, with a sort of gallows humor, that Jim has daddy issues of his own.

"I have needs, you know," Sebastian says mildly, and steps up to stand beside Jim. Sebastian looks at Rochelle's face, taut with terror; her severe fringe, heavy lashes - the tank she threw on before bed last night, the stretchy sort of pyjama pants that make her arse look fantastic.

Sebastian pulls out his pistol and shoots her in the head, because continued acquaintance with Jim doesn’t get any better.

The look on Jim's face is incandescent. Because Sebastian did it, he wonders, or because Jim didn't even have to ask?

"Might want to be a bit more careful where you get those itches scratched," Jim says, casual.

| |

To butcher a turn of phrase – if the world's a stage, Jim is the biggest player of all. He isn't Iago, isn't Claudius, isn’t even the ghost of Hamlet's father. Jim is the rage, the insanity, a broken glass of fashion - even if his face is never seen, there's never any doubt who's running the show.

| |

"Mine," Jim says, sometimes more than Sebastian's name, more than any other word, probably, because he's greedy, the greediest. He wants to own the world and all the people in it, all their scurrying little thoughts and wants and fears, the real estate in everyone's head. Everything else – the possessions, the things, the money, everything – is secondary. Jim could be a criminal without breaking a single law, if he wanted. A crime of nature.

| |

In Belarus, Sebastian wakes up tied to the headboard with Jim sitting on his legs, shaving his chest with a knife, whistling along to the radio.

"Bastard," he swears, but he can't struggle, really, not without damaging his wrists or chancing that Jim will nick something important, and wouldn't Jim _love_ that. "Shitehawk," he spits out, and flexes while Jim giggles.

" _Ohhhh_ ," Jim gasps, one long inhale, "how right you are, Seb-me-dear, _shitehawk_ , haven't heard that one in a while, you know I _love_ when you talk all military to me," in his campiest voice, "woke up with a whim this morning, you won’t deny me, will you?”

And Sebastian won’t deny him, no, not this or any of a dozen favours, a hundred requests. Sebastian, kill him, and _do_ be creative; Sebastian, be here, not a second late, maybe two minutes early, hm?; Sebastian, buy me neon green underwear from Soho; Sebastian, I wish to see you hairless and possibly bloody. Like Sebastian is a dog Jim slips the leash off now and again, too many murmured _good boys_ to ever remember the kicks.

Because Sebastian is a soldier, isn’t he - on your side until he there isn't a side anymore, with it to the end unless you kick him off the sinking ship. He was SAS; he toed the line, served crown and country, a triggerman in every sense of the word. He doesn't care who he's killing as long as it happens, as long as there's a target for him to hit, as long as there’s something to give him focus, give him the _rush_. Give him the hunt. If he serves a different kind of royalty, a different kind of _crown_ , well, it does appear to suit him better.

So he waits. He waits for Jim to finish, or lose interest. Waits for the target, waits for orders. Sometimes it’s three jobs a week, sometimes none in a month, and Sebastian doesn’t see the rhyme or reason any more than he really understands why Jim is currently scraping a blade down his inner thigh. He doesn't care about the why, really. It was never his place to question the why. Sebastian is straightforward. That's his purpose, he supposes. The whole point.

“Simple Sebastian," Jim purrs, and Sebastian feels the way it reverberates through his body, bones like tuning forks. "But not simplistic."

A very exact part in a very exact machine.

| |

To continue the metaphor - if the world's a stage, Sebastian's the one drawing the curtains. Even if only at Jim’s cue.

| |

"Distractions," Jim bemoans, constantly, "my kingdom for a _distraction_ ," while Sebastian disassembles and reassembles his guns, sharpens his knives, keeps time the only way he ever learned - the boring, utter monotony of a job well done and re-done. Jim has the look of a cat scratching at the door – out, out, let me _out_ – only there aren’t any locked doors for Jim, not really. What he’s looking for is a bit harder to pin down.

“The Virgin isn’t doing anything interesting, then,” he mutters. Sebastian had called Sherlock that from the start, at very first sight of that milksop skin, the ridiculous faces, people skills so appalling it was a wonder someone more average hadn’t killed him already. Jim had found it amusing, unbearably; had peered into Sebastian’s face with his big wet eyes, “ _ooooh_ , is someone _jealous_?”, cackling like a fishwife, and the nickname crawls out now again. Rears its ugly head the same way Sherlock does.

“Mm. Murder in Durham. Not even one of mine, silly boy." Jim's gone to picking his nails now, examining every grain and fleck he finds beneath them. "Such a shame, really. The Holmes boys are the best sort of distraction.”

Other men might be insulted by Jim’s obsession with Sherlock – and oh, it _is_ an obsession, a leap larger than a distraction, and it _is_ Sherlock, for all the fun Jim gets out of taunting Mycroft – but Sebastian knows he is not the same sort of distraction. Sherlock is friction, Sherlock is a challenge; Sherlock and Jim live in each other's heads. Sebastian has no such place, doesn’t occupy a corner of Jim’s mind the way Sherlock does, even though Jim lives in Sebastian's body - in his heart, yes, but because that is the other place certain to kill a man when you pierce it. Vulnerable to attack. Jim lives in Sebastian’s guts, in the blood running through his veins, the air in his lungs. The base of his spinal cord. Jim is a terminal affliction.

Despite this – maybe because of it, the same way adrenaline can keep you running until your heart bursts in your chest – Sebastian stands above all the rest. He doesn't capitulate. He is not a yes-man. Anyone with a nice enough suit can get one of those, and Jim has them by the dozen. Sebastian doesn't say _yes_ , not often, not just because he thinks that’s what Jim wants to hear, but because he thinks that Jim is right, Jim is _flawless_ , Jim is barking, mad as a Roman candle, not unquestionable, not infallible, but a god among men nonetheless, and gods’ only downfall is ever their pride.

“The Woman?” Sebastian suggests, because she has her fingers in all the right places and more than a few she shouldn’t, but Jim just rolls his eyes.

“Far more tedious than she thinks she is, and not half as clever.” Jim is standing next to him, now. Watching. “Just a _distraction_ , Sebastian,” he pleads, breathless and begging and shameless and so utterly, utterly false it should be funnier, the wanker. “Sometimes you can drive me... to... distraction," Jim drawls, and punctuates each pause with a flick of his eye lids, like he’s burning Sebastian into his brain, filing little bits of him away to sort out later. "That's the saying, isn't it? Sounds like a saying, certainly _seems_ true.” 

There’s another saying, one Sebastian thinks of often - 'those who burn twice as bright burn half as long' – and it was made for Jim. He's bright, yes - brilliant, yes - insane, oh yes, a thousand times, yes - but he's not built to last. The idea of Jim at eighty, at sixty, at forty - is horrifying. Hilarious. Jim Moriarty holding court in some chip shop, running his crime syndicate, “Don of London” - no no no. Never in a billion years. What's left, anyway, when you've got the world on a string? There's a clock in Jim's head, constantly running, an end date flashing ever closer. Ticking down like a bomb, the biggest brightest bomb the world will ever see.

| |

So Jim blows up buildings, he cheats art galleries, he makes people disappear in one way or another; a living directory of the deepest parts and darkest people of London's underground. He creates contingencies upon contingencies for each of his little distractions, half the genius in the planning, in the traps and the tripwires, and Sebastian is forever Jim’s ace in the hole, the card up his sleeve. Indispensable to plans that involve the famous Dr. Watson and Mr. Holmes, the Woman, Iceman, wherever Jim needs him most. A pawn always perfectly placed.

One of the things Sebastian has learned from Jim is that so little happens by coincidence, that someone is always pulling the strings. If there's a God, maybe, or even just a cosmic sense of fucking humor, he thinks it must have brought them together, or at least put Sebastian in this world for Jim to find. No one's ever understood Sebastian like Jim. Never given him what he wanted. Never understood why he wanted it, not really. He had to hide it under a veneer of civilization, doing bad things for the right reasons, and now - now he just does them because he wants to. Because Jim asks.

"The second most dangerous man in London," Jim called Sebastian, once. It means more to him than anything – more than the scent of his mother's perfume, his first human kill, his first fuck, the hunt, the tiger's still-beating heart in his hands. Sebastian has always tended to exception - it was _demanded_ of him - but to be second to Jim Moriarty is truly to be second to none other.

They are partners. They are not equals.

This Sebastian never forgets.

| |

Jim is a man of strange and often elusive tastes, as walkabout as his accent. Sebastian has seen him with others - his toys, his damned _distractions_ \- those who come to Jim bent or leave him broken, all the same, and Jim isn't interested in something as simple as pushing boundaries. There are plenty of other people for that. Plenty of other people to make a statement, to shake things up, change the system, free people from their fears, to _make the world a better place_. Jim cares about getting inside, pulling the strings, shoving inside-out or outside-in, breaking up and breaking down. Not anarchy for anarchy's sake, but because puzzles are bland, cardboard confections - everyone has more fun with the pieces than the completed picture.

In many ways, with Sebastian he is no different. It's no less violent, no less depraved. Jim likes to come on Sebastian, come in him and watch it slide out - likes to cut him and bruise him, likes to break his toys and muss them up, and why _would_ Sebastian be an exception. Jim tears things down, breaks them apart, finds more in the pieces than could ever be in the sum of any whole. But Sebastian is the only one he's ever bothered to put back together, the only one he's ever remade - not shiny or new, but cross-stitched together, here be dragons, Frankenstein's monster with love and rage both satisfied and indulged, anyone can _learn_ from someone else's mistakes if they're paying the least fucking bit of attention.

"You're extraordinary," Jim told Sebastian once. " _Extra_ -ordinary," he said, two words, in the sing-song way he says everything he really means, and that's the way Seb's always thought of it too.

| |

Sometimes Sebastian thinks about the nature of evil, so-called. The violence he finds himself lent to so easily. Is it a divine test - is he supposed to resist, he wonders, dispassionate - or was he made for this purpose? Is it hereditary? Did the military trigger something in him? Make it _grow_? Or was it just a matter of time, regardless - London or India or the fields of bloody Dover - was it _always_ just a matter of time?

"I suppose it’s a question for the geneticists, my dear," Jim says. "Never put much stock in psychologists myself."

| |

Sometimes he hates it, chafes under it, the knowledge that Jim can glean from him in just one glance, the way his eyes slide down and file it away, like Sebastian is a junk drawer he's just jumbled through. Sometimes it works for him, stomping into the flat, teeth gritted, an unholy light in his eyes, and Jim perches next to him, trills, "poor Sebastian, poor _Seb_ , did we have a bad day?” hands in his hair, yanking his head so hard his neck cracks. "Didn't we wreak a proper amount of havoc? Was the naughty, naughty ambassador not enough of challenge?"

"Fat men don't run very fast," Sebastian says. "Imagine that."

"I _imagine_ dragging his body around was a touch difficult," Jim snickers, and it _was_ , but not the good kind of difficulty, though the sulfuric acid was really quite spectacular. The object wasn't even really to make the body disappear - Sebastian left the teeth behind.

Tonight Jim drags him to bed - drags, quite literally, after he kneads the muscles of Sebastian's neck into submission, after he feeds him Scotch from a plastic cup he'd picked up God knows where – it’s yellow and polka-dotted, clearly meant for a child - and Sebastian feels loose, bones knocking around his body, thoughts knocking around his brain, so badly his feet barely hold under him. Very tired, or even drugged. Never to be written off.

"Darling," Jim murmurs against Sebastian's chest, ever the coquette. Faux-sympathetic except the ways in which he's not. "You seem tense," and he pushes Sebastian onto his back, hands in Sebastian's hair, feeling out the scar just behind his ear. " _Needy_ ," he crows - god, yes, Sebastian is, it never stops, like a fire in the pit of his belly he can't ever permanently sate, hasn't even begun to douse. Jim has stoked that need, petted it, soothed it like some sort of feral cat curling up and around his fingers, snapping when it's not quite hard enough. Always pushing for a reaction, for _attention_.

Because the irony is that Jim gets plenty of attention, doesn't he - Jim Moriarty has the attention of the _world_ , people absolutely clamoring for his diabolical brain. But it gets so boring after a while, doesn't it, so one-note, always the same problems, the same neediness. People enjoy illusions, not the explanations, and Sebastian is the only one who understands the madness behind the methods, the man behind the plans. And _he_ doesn't need anything, doesn't want anything except what Jim already wants, the mayhem and the destruction, the dead bodies, the scorched earth, cutting the strings and tangling them into knots, fixing the odds and taking it all, changing everything detail by detail until it's a whole new bloody world with their stamp all over it.

Jim stares down at him for a moment, a perfect rictus grin on his face. "Getting sentimental, are we, lover?" he asks, and his kisses are slow, languid - they leave his mouth red and wet and dangerous - and Sebastian wants to push back for more, _demand_ more, but Jim's fingers dig in just under his jaw. Feeling out the joint.

It takes a few minutes for Jim to lose his patience, or pretend he has; for the cooing, the crooning to turn into biting and snapping - the humming and whistling to scraping and bruising. Jim marks his way across Sebastian's body in careful increments, pushing for a reaction, more and more petulant, like a child with a trick, smart enough to figure out that pretty please will only go so far, and being bad brings you more attention than being good ever could.

"Are we being a little contrary today?" he asks, peeling away what remains of Sebastian's shirt, and Sebastian's answering grin is as sharp as any Jim has ever shown. Sometimes the only way to win a game is to not play, and just because Sherlock bloody Holmes can't stand to leave well enough alone doesn't mean Sebastian can't be cannier. "Are we searching for our _limits_?" Jim says, just as suddenly stern as a judge, like he's not secretly pleased, ready for the game Sebastian isn't playing. Like he doesn't already know the answer, doesn’t know all the answers.

Because there are no limits, Sebastian thinks, wildly, as Jim's arm presses down harder and harder against his trachea, air hissing out his throat but not in, the edges of his vision like a wavering halo. There never have been. There are plenty of nights they fight, _really_ fight - knockout, drag-down, no safe words, no tap outs, no mercy - where someone usually passes out and both of them almost certainly bleed. Sebastian is well-trained and knows how to fight dirty besides, but Jim knows Sebastian's body like a lover, a doctor, a butcher - he can make Sebastian fall apart at the seams before Sebastian even realizes there are places he was once stitched back together.

Most people only see Jim right before they die, and Sebastian knows that applies to him too. A longer reprieve doesn't mean his death will be any easier, or that it won't come. Saints always end badly, and Sebastian can only assume he will live up to his namesake, dying for Jim in one bloody way another.

"What do you want, Sebastian?" Jim asks, head tilted, curious as a bird and somehow nearly as light, even as his fingers dig into the tendons of Sebastian's wrists; the one place Jim would never hurt, not really, because Sebastian is only as useful as his aim. Sebastian doesn't fear for his wrists, his fingers, his eyes - not his best features, exactly, but the most useful ones. "Is there something you want? Could always ask, you know. Use your pretty words. Maybe a please or two, give us a good _beg_ ," and something in Jim's eyes _goes_ at the word because he's seen it, the tiniest crack in Sebastian's armor, there it is, better than the broad side of a barn because where's the challenge otherwise.

"I could make you beg," Jim continues - monotone, nearly, low and bored, because they've heard begging a thousand times before, haven't they, the wailing and the crying and the pleading and the bargaining. Everyone's the same when you strip them down, when they finally let go of all appearance and pretense and are just bloody _human_. Ordinary. And Sebastian is not ordinary. Not with Jim.

Sometimes it feels like Sebastian barely had a life before Jim Moriarty, every memory of that previous existence rendered conspicuous only by his absence. A phantom limb in reverse, the feeling only in his head - like that isn't the hardest goddamn thing to fix.

Hell. Maybe he _is_ getting sentimental.

And Jim reads it on him, of course, " _sweet_ heart," mock-surprised - his best face, really, the wide-eyes, the O of his mouth. Steadying himself on Sebastian - one knee pushed into his stomach, not accidental but deliberate, pushing into the wound Sebastian got in Yalta, the bastard, and Sebastian is really far enough gone that he thinks that with fondness, now.

So Sebastian digs his fingers into Jim's thighs, practically to the bone - such a skinny bastard, the scourge of London, could snap him like a twig if Sebastian ever developed a death wish - and pushes Jim back, scratches back, bites back, gives Jim what he wants, Sebastian thinks, and hisses when Jim shoves his thigh between Sebastian's legs. Not quite debilitating, but certainly not _comfortable_. Getting off on the friction anyway because he wouldn't be here if he wasn't something of a sick fuck. Sebastian can already feel the places he'll be sore tomorrow, swollen and aching - chewed on, scratched, pinched, a thousand tiny sensations, millions of nerve endings all screaming and protesting at once, coming and going in swells and waves, a symphony of pain that Jim conducts brutally, relentlessly, brilliantly.

And Jim is right, Sebastian does want something, wants all he's getting and more; knows he’s getting it, when Jim pushes his own pants aside – corduroys, _Christ_ , what story was he selling today – and settles his knees on either side of Sebastian’s hips. One hand steadying Sebastian’s cock before Jim shoves himself down onto it – no warning and almost painful, the sudden tightness, the slick heat pulling him in almost more than Jim is pushing down.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he says, one word slipping out, kneading Jim’s thighs even as Jim grins. Claws at the ready.

Jim opened himself open who knows how long ago, right after Sebastian left, maybe, just before he came back – Jim knows how the job is going to go before Sebastian does, knew it wouldn’t satisfy him, not really, _knew_ he’d want a fight or a fuck or both, and Jim set it up for Sebastian, gave it to him, or maybe to himself, because Jim wants what Sebastian wants what Jim wants - an ourboros that would never stop eating, even if it could.

“Fuck,” again, fingers pushing into the barely-there curves of Jim’s arse, pulling him down even as Sebastian thrusts up. Not in control, if he ever was, and flying freely without it. He’s been hard for an age, or so it feels like; drunk and probably drugged – can’t forget that – bruised and beaten, half-strangled, showing his teeth and definitely not pulling his punches, and Jim riding him, bruising them against one another, spreading down, bone-deep.

Jim could always have pulled Sebastian into bed one way or another - by playing on his emotions, or his needs, all those _daddy issues_ \- but Sebastian is already bent that way, infinitely easier than the _bending_ , and inclined to the sort of violence Jim prefers when he's scratching his own itch and not somebody else's. There is a hunger in Sebastian, a violence - but what makes him so different from other people is that he doesn't feel bad about it. Doesn't think _he's_ bad either. He just is. 

"They claim psychopaths don't experience genuine emotions,” Jim says, and flashes a ragged smile. Something like emotion tearing at the edges. Where was Jim before he found Sebastian - what was he like, burning alone at the center of the world, everything falling into those deep dark eyes? "Does this feel genuine?"

As anything Sebastian's ever felt.

| |


End file.
